“Louvers won’t work, they reflect light too,” he wrote in June in a blog comment on dallasnews, “and retrofitting on a 42 story building has never been tried and the makers say they would rip off in high winds prevalent in Dallas.”

An honest opinion, except that there is no such Barry Schwarz.

This post and others proved to be the work of Mike Snyder, long a fixture in the city and now a public relations executive who had been hired by the tower’s outside law firm.
— nytimes.com

The highly anticipated expansion to the Kimbell Art Museum, designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) and Kendall/Heaton Associates, opens to the public on Wednesday, November 27, 2013.

Renzo Piano’s colonnaded pavilion stands as an expression of simplicity—glass, concrete and wood—surrounded by elms and red oaks, some 65 yards to the west of Louis I. Kahn’s vaulted, luminous museum of 1972.

Similar in scale to the Kahn building, the 300-foot-long, 22-foot-high building is composed of two parallel wings stretching from north to south, connected by two glass passageways. To the rear, the west wing will have a green sod roof, which appears to rise out of the ground with berms on either... View full entry »

This year both parties met to begin working toward some sort of solution. Negotiations soon turned sour; squabbles ensued. The tower people wanted the museum to modify its roof. The museum replied by saying, essentially, "we were here first." Tom Luce, a local lawyer and civic leader, agreed to act as a mediator. Late last month he stepped aside in frustration.

Only 15 of the 126 apartments (priced at $1.3 million to $4.5 million, not including the $20 million penthouse) have sold.
— online.wsj.com

“One of the things that may come out of the study is that the design of those cones [the north-facing oculi] may have inadvertently or in some other way, you know, turned out to actually have reflections coming in when Renzo sold you a bill of goods that said it wouldn’t.”

That’s how Criswell remembers the exchange weeks later.... He is clearly proud that he stood up to Strick, a man who, he says, isn’t accustomed to having people talk back. And he’s proud that he insulted Renzo Piano."
— D magazine

Great story on the creation of the new Museum Tower in Dallas, which is baking the very district it's meant to be an anchor for... View full entry »